Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Rose-Colored Hindsight. Sullivan specializes in retrofitting past policy and pronouncements to fit the current fact cycle.  You can dance around it all you want, but WMD absolutely was the sales pitch for the war.  In addition, the Administration repeatedly painted that threat as being imminent and massive.  The imminence was amplified by Powell's speech, Rice's comments, and numerous stories and briefings.  The threat of nuclear terrorism was used to amplify the level of the threat. It is a simple exercise to simply visit the White House site, peruse the speeches and briefings, and locate pronouncements that tie Hussein to 9/11, and play up the threat he posed.  They're all there, right from the beginning.  There is no need to go to any other source. Like it or not, Bush went into this war with a weak hand, and a strong bluff.  He bet he could locate WMD; that he would be able to justify, after the fact, his actions.  Now that the reality doesn't match up to the sales job, his supporters are frantically misdirecting and revising. The not-so-hidden subtext before the war was that Bush KNEW, somehow, about a very real threat that Hussein represented...that there was classified information that he couldn't reveal that gave him a certainty that we in the public sphere could not share, because in our sphere the evidence did not exist. "Continuation of the '91 war" arguments are foolish.  Ask this simple question: If 9/11 had not happened, would Bush have invaded?  Or would he have simply let time take its course. 2:05:42 PM     | comment [] | trackback []